Valence and the development of immediate and long-term false memory illusions

Abstract

This is the accepted version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. and children's (Experiment 2) true recall and recognition was better for neutral than negative items and although false recall was also higher for neutral items, false recognition was higher for negative items. The last three experiments examined adults' (Experiment 3) and children's (Experiments 4 and 5) one-week long-term recognition of neutral and negative-emotional information. The results replicated the immediate recall and recognition findings from the first two experiments. More important, these experiments showed that although true recognition decreased over the one-week interval, false recognition of neutral items remained unchanged whereas false recognition of negative-emotional items increased. These findings are discussed in terms of theories of emotion and memory as well as their forensic implications. Permanent repository linkKeywords: Valence and memory; False memory development; DRM paradigmValence and the Development of Immediate and Long-Term False Memory Illusions Our memory is a reconstructive process in which errors often occur (for an overview see Koriat, Goldsmith, & Pansky, 2000). That means that we might falsely remember details that we in fact did not encounter. In recent years, the development of false memories has been extensively studied with the Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm (Deese, 1959;Roediger & McDermott, 1995). Using this paradigm, participants are presented with word lists that consist of close semantic associates of a non-presented critical lure. For example, a list might consist of the words door, glass, pane, shade, ledge, sill, house, open, curtain, frame, view, breeze, sash, screen, and shutter which are all related to the non-presented word window. Studies have shown that participants have the tendency to falsely recall and recognize the critical lures during subsequent memory tests (for an overview see Gallo, 2006). Another robust finding obtained with the DRM paradigm is a reverse age effect. Specifically, studies have shown that the development of spontaneous false memories increases as a function of age (e.g., Brainerd, Reyna, & Brandse, 1995;Howe, 2005Howe, , 2006Howe, , 2008Sugrue & Hayne, 2006). The low levels of spontaneous false memories found in young children may be due to a failure to automatically access associative relations between list items and the critical lure (associative-activation theory, or AAT, e.g., Howe, 2005Howe, , 2008Howe, Gagnon, & Thouas, 2008;Howe, Wimmer, & Blease, 2009a;Howe, Wimmer, Gagnon, & Plumpton, 2009b) or to extract gist memories across words on DRM lists (fuzzy-trace theory, or FTT, e.g., Brainerd & Reyna, 2005).Despite the robust findings produced by the DRM paradigm, researchers have questioned the ecological validity of this paradigm (Freyd & Gleaves, 1996). One concern raised by Freyd and Gleaves is that in real world scenarios false memories often involve emotional events. To address this concer...

Eliminating age differences in children’s and adults’ suggestibility and memory conformity effects.

“…Previous research has found that reversal effects emerge independent of the emotional nature of stimuli (Brainerd, Holliday, Reyna, Yang, & Toglia, 2010;Howe, Candel, Otgaar, & Malone, 2010). However, most of this research has focused exclusively on emotion and developmental reversal effects in spontaneous false memories.…”

“…Four DRM lists (2 neutral: bread, foot; 2 negative: pain, cry) were drawn from a larger pool (see Howe et al, 2010) "'Big' Bertha was the daughter of the baker. Her name was actually just Bertha, but because she loved butter and sweet fillings, she became a bit bigger in weight.…”

Developmental Trends in Different Types of Spontaneous False Memories: Implications for the Legal Field

“…The effectiveness of these lists in eliciting spontaneous false memories has already been demonstrated in previous research (Howe et al, 2010;Otgaar & Candel, 2011;Otgaar et al, 2012b). List items were chosen from the Dutch word association norms (Van Loon-Vervoorn & Van Bekkum, 1991) and were presented in order of backward associative strength, from strongest to weakest, in line with Howe et al (2010) and Otgaar and Candel (2011). With assistance of the CELEX lexical database (Baayen, Piepenbrock, & Gulikers, 1995), we made sure that the mean word frequency of the neutral and emotional critical lures did not differ, t(8) = 0.22, ns.…”

“…We used 5 neutral (bread, window, sweet, smoke, feet) and 5 negative (murder, pain, punishment, death, cry) DRM word lists with each list containing 10 words. The effectiveness of these lists in eliciting spontaneous false memories has already been demonstrated in previous research (Howe et al, 2010;Otgaar & Candel, 2011;Otgaar et al, 2012b). List items were chosen from the Dutch word association norms (Van Loon-Vervoorn & Van Bekkum, 1991) and were presented in order of backward associative strength, from strongest to weakest, in line with Howe et al (2010) and Otgaar and Candel (2011).…”

“…The reason for using such material is to better mimic real-life situations in which false memories can have devastating effects, like for example criminal trials of sexual abuse. So, recent studies have included emotionally-negative and arousing DRM word lists to stimulate false memory production (e.g., Brainerd, Holliday, Reyna, Yang, & Toglia, 2011;Goodman et al, 2011;Howe, Candel, Otgaar, Malone, & Wimmer, 2010). In general, these studies have found that although recall measures show that neutral false memories are more likely to develop than negative false memories, negative false memories are easier falsely recognized than neutral false memories; a finding that has also been demonstrated with suggestion-based false memories (e.g., Otgaar et al, 2008;Porter, Taylor, & ten Brinke, 2008).…”